Reading Time: < 1 minute

A few blogs have picked up the story about the paid links allegedly obtained by JC Penney’s former SEO company SearchDex. Vanessa Fox’s detailed article in SearchEngineLand led me to Doug Unplugged, the blog of Doug Pierce, of Blue Fountain Media.

An interesting find by Doug was SearchDex’s client list, which has now been taken offline but might still be in the (Google cache). If you have a paid account at OpenSiteExplorer or MajesticSEO, it might be worth checking out the backlinks.

The discussion at Webmasterworld: Paid Links at JC Penney – Google Takes Manual Action.

Google demotes JC Penney; JC Penney fires SEO company

13 February 2011

Ash Nallawalla

Reading Time: 3 minutes

The New York Times has published a well-informed account of how a major US retailer was using alleged paid links from dubious websites. Entitled The Dirty Little Secrets of Search, writer David Segal outlines the process of searching for household items and then is surprised that:

in the last several months, one name turned up, with uncanny regularity, in the No. 1 spot for each and every term:

J. C. Penney.

The company bested millions of sites — and not just in searches for dresses, bedding and area rugs. For months, it was consistently at or near the top in searches for “skinny jeans,” “home decor,” “comforter sets,” “furniture” and dozens of other words and phrases, from the blandly generic (“tablecloths”) to the strangely specific (“grommet top curtains”).

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JC Penney followup: Doug Pierce’s research for the NYT expose

Google demotes JC Penney; JC Penney fires SEO company

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